Witsec (27 page)

“I told the guard: ‘Tell Geraldo to call our public information office and make an appointment,’ and Geraldo grabs the phone out of the security guy’s hand and says, ‘Safir, come on out!’ I said: ‘I don’t think so.
Call our public information people, make an appointment, and then maybe I will talk to you.’ Geraldo says, ‘You’re a liar and I know you’re a liar and we are going to prove it.’ After he said that, I hung up on him.”

For several days, Rivera and his film crew staked out the lobby. Each time a male employee passed by them, Rivera dashed up with his crew’s cameras running. “Are you Howard Safir?” he’d ask, since he didn’t know what Safir looked like.

“I finally told the guards,” Safir recalled, “to kick his ass out!” A few days later Safir got a call from a top Justice Department official who was a friend of an ABC News executive. “I was told, ‘You ought to do this interview.’ ” Bowing to pressure, Safir agreed, but he didn’t trust Rivera. “I hired my own audio-recording company,” Safir recalled, “and when Geraldo walked in my office for the interview, there was a guy with a reel-to-reel recorder and microphone sitting there. Geraldo says, ‘What’s this?’ and I say, ‘You are going to record, I am going to record.’ He says, ‘Well, we are not doing this if you are going to record,’ and I say, ‘Okay, see ya, have a nice day.’ So then Geraldo says, ‘Okay, we are doing this under duress.’ ”

An ABC producer later remembered the encounter differently. He claimed Safir had hidden a microphone beneath a tabletop, putting Rivera under electronic surveillance. Regardless, both sides would later describe the interview as confrontational. “There was hostility,” Rivera recalled, “no question about it.” An ABC producer added: “You could cut the tension with a knife.”

Rivera called his report “Hostages of Fear” when it was broadcast on the prime-time news show
20/20
in October 1980, and just as Safir had feared, it lambasted the Marshals Service. An indignant Rivera told viewers
that Safir’s deputies had done such a horrible job relocating and protecting federal witnesses that scores of them were living in fear. Some had become so distraught that they had committed suicide. Others had been murdered by the mob.

Much of the program centered on the tragic case of Frank Calimano, who had entered WITSEC in 1978 along with his wife, Vivian, and their two teenage sons. Calimano was not the usual WITSEC witness because he was not a criminal. In fact, he had never been in any sort of trouble with the police. In 1976, he had agreed to let the FBI run an undercover operation inside the air-conditioning and heating company that he owned on Long Island, New York, and during the following year the FBI secretly videotaped members of the Gambino crime family in Calimano’s office bribing and threatening union officials and construction company owners. When the FBI was ready to begin making arrests, federal prosecutors asked Calimano to testify in front of a grand jury. His wife urged him not to do it, saying: “You’ve done enough.” But Calimano, a Korean combat veteran, told her that every American had a civic duty to step forward if he had information about a crime. As soon as he testified, he became a marked man, and prosecutors urged him to enter WITSEC and disappear.

WITSEC relocated Calimano and his family in Houston, Texas, and everything went smoothly at first. He opened another air-conditioning and heating business, which he financed completely on his own by taking out a bank loan. “I don’t want any government handouts,” he told deputies. But there was a hitch. Because he had lost his good credit standing when he was given a new identity, the only way he could qualify for the loan was by putting up as collateral several expensive pieces of business equipment that he owned.

Two years later, Vivian was buying groceries when someone called out her old name. It was a former friend from Long Island, and it turned out that she and her husband had bought a house only a few blocks from where the Calimanos now lived. The local WITSEC inspector told Calimano that he and his family needed to leave Houston immediately because their cover had been blown. But Calimano said he needed time to close down his business. Besides, he didn’t have enough cash to pay off his bank debt.

By this time, Safir and Shur had implemented a number of regulations that made it more difficult for witnesses to flee town without paying their debts. Those who tried could be sued in civil court or even prosecuted for fraud. Rivera told viewers that Calimano felt trapped. If he didn’t flee immediately, he would be booted out of WITSEC for not following its orders, but if he left Houston, he wouldn’t be able to pay off the bank loan. At the least, he would lose his collateral, and he might possibly be sued.

Calimano turned to Safir for help. In an emotional letter, he asked if the Marshals Service would pay the interest on his bank debt for six months, giving him time to relocate and get a new business off the ground. To Calimano, it seemed a reasonable request, especially since he had made significant sacrifices for the government and had never demanded anything in return. “Frank believed our government would always do the right thing,” a tearful Vivian told Rivera.

But Safir flatly rejected Calimano’s request. In a stern letter, he explained that the Justice Department had decided it was illegal for the Marshals Service to get involved financially in business deals with witnesses. This included paying their debts. Continuing, he warned Calimano that if he didn’t leave Houston at
once, the Marshals Service could not guarantee his safety and he would be terminated from the WITSEC program for failing to follow its rules.

Calimano became so severely depressed that on June 1, 1980, his family arranged for him to enter a Veterans Administration hospital for psychiatric help. The night before Calimano checked in, he recorded his thoughts on tape. “I feel betrayed,” he said. He and his family were “hostages of fear”—afraid of mob retribution yet trapped by WITSEC’s rules. “I have a funny feeling about walking into that hospital,” he added. “I am not going to survive this.”

Six days later Calimano hanged himself.

“We didn’t know what to do,” Vivian Calimano told Rivera. “There was no way for us to leave, because of the business.”

After reminding
20/20
viewers that Calimano had been an honest citizen who had responded heroically when the FBI asked for his help, Rivera assessed blame. “According to the people closest to Frank Calimano,” he announced, “it was the inflexibility of Mr. Safir and the Marshals Service that eventually drove Calimano over the brink.”

Rivera’s cameras then cut to a stiff Howard Safir sitting at his desk at the Marshals Service operations center with an American flag perched behind him. When Rivera asked him about the suicide, Safir said he was prohibited by WITSEC rules from discussing individual cases. “There are privacy issues here,” he declared.

“Why?” Rivera retorted. “Calimano is dead.” He then switched subjects. “Have you ever lost a witness to an assassin’s bullet or a knife or poison?” he asked.

“In the ten years that the program has been in operation, we know that no witness under the active protection
of the Marshals Service has ever been killed,” Safir replied.

The cameras immediately cut to Rivera, now standing outdoors.

“But Mr. Safir was either badly misinformed or intentionally lying about the unblemished record of the Federal Witness Protection Program,” Rivera declared. “On July twenty-sixth—that was less than two weeks before our interview with Mr. Safir—the badly decomposed body of a woman was found in this rock quarry near Little Rock, Arkansas. The woman was identified as Sheila Anne Bishop. A federally protected witness, she had been murdered.”

The camera then cut to Pulaski County sheriff’s investigator Larry Dill, standing with Rivera at the spot where Bishop had been shot in the back of the head.

The cameras immediately cut back to Safir.

Cut back to Dill.

Rivera’s cutting back and forth left a vivid image in the minds of viewers: Howard Safir was a liar. And WITSEC was a program run dangerously amok.

Safir was furious. “My kids were watching it,” he recalled. “My mother was watching it. I’m getting calls from all my friends saying, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ ”

Safir was so incensed that after several weeks of stewing, he filed a $10 million defamation suit against Rivera and ABC. The thrust of his suit was that one of his answers to a pivotal question had been intentionally distorted to make it appear as if he were lying. Midway in the broadcast Rivera had asked whether any witnesses had ever been murdered. Safir had replied that none had, and at that moment the cameras had cut to the Arkansas rock quarry where Rivera was standing. Rivera had then said: “Mr. Safir was either badly misinformed or intentionally lying.”

In his lawsuit, Safir revealed that the second half of his answer to that question had been edited out by Rivera. Because Safir had taped the entire interview, he was able to reconstruct exactly what he had said. Television viewers heard Safir say: “In the ten years that the program’s been in operation, we know that no witness under the active protection of the Marshals Service has ever been killed.” Rivera had cut away from Safir at that point. On Safir’s tape, however, he could then be heard saying: “There have been thirteen witnesses, who were in the program at one time,
killed, and in all of those cases, it was as a result of a breach of their own security.”

Safir thought he had caught Rivera and ABC red-handed, but the network’s attorneys claimed that Rivera had actually been practicing “responsible journalism” when he edited out the second half of Safir’s comment.

“We knew at the time that the number Safir used [thirteen] was not true,” Rivera explained later. His producers had discovered that at least seventeen WITSEC witnesses either had been murdered or had committed suicide since 1970. “We have no obligation to broadcast a person’s statement if the statement isn’t true,” Rivera declared.

Safir and his lawyers argued that Rivera and ABC’s response was a red herring raised by the network’s lawyers to deflect attention away from the basis of the suit, which they said was Rivera’s biased editing. Whether thirteen or seventeen witnesses had been killed really wasn’t the issue, they said; the fact remained that Safir had acknowledged on camera to Rivera during the interview that WITSEC witnesses had been murdered. But Rivera had edited his answer to make it appear as if Safir had said that no witness had ever been killed. Since the next
20/20
scene showed Rivera standing at the spot where a witness had been found dead, viewers were led to believe Safir had lied, especially when Rivera himself suggested that “Mr. Safir was … intentionally lying.”

As is customary in such cases, legal costs skyrocketed. Safir contacted a media watchdog group in Washington called Accuracy in Media, and it agreed to help pay his legal bills.

Safir was not the only WITSEC official angry about Rivera’s story. “During my career,” Gerald Shur
said later, “I’d dealt with dozens of reporters, and I’d always felt comfortable around them even when they disagreed with me. But I felt Geraldo had taken a single suicide and statements by a few angry witnesses and contrived to turn them into a sensational and misleading story just in order to get a shocking story on the air. I was furious when I learned he had edited Howard’s words to make him look like a liar. It was lousy journalism.”

Although WITSEC had been criticized in newspaper and television reports periodically in the past, nearly all of those stories had focused on gripes by individual witnesses about problems they had encountered after they were relocated. Rivera’s was the first report that suggested the Marshals Service was not adequately protecting witnesses from the mob. “I knew witnesses were not being killed by the people they testified against,” Shur recalled, “and I was afraid the
20/20
program was going to have a negative impact on the number of witnesses coming forward to testify.”

Shur had asked an independent panel in the Justice Department in 1977 to determine if WITSEC witnesses were being adequately protected by the Marshals Service. It had investigated every death that had occurred in the program from its start in 1970 through early 1978, including murders, suicides, and any deaths under unusual circumstances. Its findings: